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Novell: Customers are coming back

Andrew Donoghue ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 13 Jan 2004 18:10 GMT

After announcing the completion of its acquisition of SuSE, Novell this week joined the likes of HP and Sun in offering to provide financial and legal aid, or indemnification, to any of its customers that are prosecuted by SCO for licensing violations.

But having Novell in your corner comes at a price. Customers will have to purchase, if they don't own it already, Suse Linux Enterprise Server 8 as well as an upgrade protection and a qualifying technical support contract.

ZDNet UK spoke with Novell's UK MD Steve Brown about the motivation behind the indemnification decision, integration between Suse and Ximian and seeing Novell back on top again.

What was the motivation behind this indemnification announcement? Have you had many UK companies requesting this kind of protection?

It has come up in conversation but I wouldn't say it's the number one inhibitor to progress. But I think it is something where they are looking over their shoulder because of this pending action. I think that they might feel a little exposed if they go ahead and make a full-scale deployment because as the user they are the guys who are going to be liable for any copyright action. So what we really wanted to do was put in something that would be an enormous copyright boost for the customer, something that says, "We would like you to go ahead. We have good faith in our position on this case and should any action arise against you as an individual, then Novell will indemnify you and will either assist you in the action or fight the action on your behalf."

Given Novell's claims on parts of Unix, do you think you are in a stronger position to offer indemnification than say HP or Sun?

I think we are. The HP move back in December, was a positive move, we have also seen the Open Source Development Labs setting up a very similar fund. I think it all gives customers more and more confidence to go ahead and make the deployments they require.

How many UK customers do you think are actually going to seek out indemnification?

I don't think we have really gone that deep at the moment. We are working with the SuSE people here in the UK and talking to our own customers about it. It is still early days to get the assimilation but a lot of the events we are running around Linux have been very well attended. There are a lot of requests for pilot implementations and installations.